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Co-op stories and career advice from Northeastern students and alumni

The Works is your one-stop hub for information, anecdotes, and tips on co-op and career development from those who have lived it themselves: Fellow students and alumni.

From global opportunities and startups to innovation in the classroom and professional growth, experiential learning at Northeastern takes you places. Let us show you where.

Have a story to share? Contact Kelly.

Who is The Works? As your blog curator, I search for and collect content that shares Northeastern’s unique story, and demonstrates the value of experiential learning.

As a Northeastern University alumna and career counselor, I have my own co-op stories, career advice, and experiences to share, too. The Works combines my passions for experiential learning, education, and digital media.

Whether you’re a current student, an alum, or faculty or staff member, we want to learn more about your stories and insights and look forward to sharing them. To contribute to The Works, send an email with your post idea to k.scott@neu.edu, and I’ll send you more details. Also, don’t forget to comment! A blog is better when its readers are also part of its voice.

A New Year’s Reflection

This article was written by Megan Fer­nandes, a 4th year inter­na­tional affairs stu­dent at NU as a guest blogger for The Works.

With the New Year upon us, it’s nat­ural to find your­self reflecting back on the year’s events and some of the life lessons you’ve learned. They say that under­standing your his­tory helps you plan for your future, and I think the start of the New Year is a good time to revisit and learn from the per­sonal journey you’ve been on over the year—what have you gained this past year? What con­tri­bu­tions have you made? What were your suc­cesses and your fail­ures? New Year’s isn’t simply about new begin­nings; it’s also about looking back in order to better deter­mine what new begin­nings lie ahead. In per­sonal and pro­fes­sional terms, it’s also impor­tant to reflect on how past work expe­ri­ences shape who you are today and who you want to be in 2014.

Co-​​op is an oppor­tu­nity to gain expe­ri­ence and learn about the work­force. I’ve been very delib­erate in my attempt to find and gather “take­aways” from each co-​​op to help me make better work-​​related deci­sions in the future. For example, after sev­eral rounds of inter­views, I’ve noticed that one of the qual­i­ties most appre­ci­ated by employers when they first meet you is gen­uine thought­ful­ness. This doesn’t simply mean preparing thoughtful ques­tions for an inter­view, but being able to explain why and how a par­tic­ular company/​position fits into your overall career goals. Employers appre­ciate when you go into an inter­view knowing what skills and industry knowl­edge you want to gain from working at that par­tic­ular orga­ni­za­tion and in turn, how the job will make you a more qual­i­fied future can­di­date. A com­pelling way to artic­u­late this isn’t by rat­tling off the ben­e­fits and supe­rior qual­i­ties a par­tic­ular com­pany or posi­tion has, but by pro­viding the inter­viewer with solid exam­ples of how you’ve lever­aged past expe­ri­ences to get closer to your ulti­mate career goals. Being insightful and thoughtful about these aspects of your past expe­ri­ences is a mean­ingful way to create a story about your­self for interviewers.

Addi­tion­ally, relaying to employers that you under­stand how your pre­vious expe­ri­ences have built upon each other allows them to trust you more easily. While not all work expe­ri­ences seem to relate to each other (like going from a weightlifting non­profit working with gang youth in Boston to an agri­cul­ture start up in Cameroon in my case), making simple and mean­ingful con­nec­tions between expe­ri­ences is always pos­sible. These con­nec­tions can exist on many levels. For example, I worked with very flex­ible bosses who didn’t have the time to micro manage me in both posi­tions. That sim­i­larity taught me to take ini­tia­tive when I saw prob­lems or inef­fi­cien­cies in dif­ferent types of sit­u­a­tions. Another example is that due to orga­ni­za­tional, phys­ical, and cul­tural dif­fer­ences, I devel­oped stronger inter­per­sonal skills with people from var­ious cul­tural and socio-​​economic back­grounds, and I learned how to be more thor­ough and con­cise in my com­mu­ni­ca­tion as face time with my super­vi­sors at each co-​​op was rare. A large take­away from both work expe­ri­ences was a more solid under­standing of what I like and need in a work envi­ron­ment in order to be suc­cessful; such as a lively office cul­ture and struc­tured time com­mit­ments. You can always find con­nec­tions, and while it may be dif­fi­cult at first, this is pre­cisely the first step in cul­ti­vating the sort of thought­ful­ness that really res­onates with people, espe­cially employers. Even­tu­ally I’ve also found that I’ve been able to make deci­sions about my work expe­ri­ences with a greater level of delib­er­ate­ness and con­fi­dence because I’ve taken the time to draw these par­al­lels and con­nec­tions from past experiences.

So take this New Years to do a little brain­work in tying all of your past work expe­ri­ences together into a thoughtful and com­pelling per­sonal story. Remember, telling this story will help you to make those con­nec­tions between expe­ri­ences, show people your ability to process and grow from each expe­ri­ence, and give people insight into you as a person. And this does not work well as a one-​​time process right before an inter­view; it should be a con­stant under­taking that helps make those yearly new begin­nings and res­o­lu­tions all the more mean­ingful each time. So give your­self a new begin­ning career-​​wise this coming year, one that starts with a more thoughtful ver­sion of yourself.

Megan Fer­nandes is an inter­na­tional affairs stu­dent in her fourth year at North­eastern with aca­d­emic inter­ests revolving around global poverty alle­vi­a­tion. Megan is orig­i­nally from Houston, but went to high school in Bangkok, Thai­land before moving to Boston. She loves learning about other cul­tures and would be happy to show new people around Boston!

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